The truth is out there. But where?

Jon Carroll
| on November 10, 2015

A friend of mine said, “I didn’t know you were old enough to watch ‘60 Minutes.’” Well, I am, although I may be at the lower end of their demographic. “60 Minutes” is a self-mythologizing institution that features stories on splashy technological innovations (heavy on the medical science, because we ain’t getting any younger), national security and defense issues, celebrities who have achieved iconic status in New York, plus the occasional “Gee whiz, look at what the kids are into” feature.

There are a lot of stories exposing flaws in our defense system, always with the “our country’s secret peril” angle. We are in danger! Also prominent is fact-challenged reporter Lara Logan reporting on how the military is wonderful and handsome and charming, and how the Islamic State hates Christians. (Nothing better than to get conservative Christians on board with the disastrous hawkish fantasies Logan has been promoting all along.)

The show is government company line all the way. In Sunday’s program, in a segment on flaws in security clearances, correspondent Scott Pelley went out of his way to slime Edward Snowden, based on utterly no evidence. But it was very slick; people may not have noticed. So another nonfact fact about Snowden is out there; TV has worked its magic.

But I do like Big Science, and I am old, so still I watch. The latest show also had a piece on CERN, the gigantic collider in Switzerland that sends protons rushing into each other at insane speeds. This is the project that first saw the Higgs boson, the previously unknown thingie that makes the entire universe possible.

There was also a little educated chat about string theory, multidimensional universes and dark matter. I love that stuff, and I was geeking out, until I had a sudden unwelcome thought: How many Republican presidential candidates care about this stuff? How many even know about it?

We know that Republicans in general believe in creationism (47 percent) as opposed to evolution (43 percent). So probably they don’t care about any science premised on the Big Bang.

There’s an information gap in this country as grave as the income gap. People at the bottom (black and white) don’t have much access to the Internet and even less access to books — or reason to read them. Bright people may question, but what form do those questions take? How to even formulate them without access to data — or, indeed, the skills with which to evaluate that data?

The decline of facts is everywhere apparent. The ethos of the commercial Internet, the scrambling quest for eyeballs at any cost, means that mitigating factors are ignored. Who cares if it was one study following 13 people for six months, if Science Proves Potatoes Cause Cancer can generate website traffic? Who cares if Jeb Bush is visiting his ill housekeeper at her home, if Bush’s Secret Love House gets 20 million unique viewers?

Politicians always lie; it’s a condition of the job. They even lie in their campaign autobiographies. Ben Carson is hardly alone in this matter; Donald Trump also told some whoppers, and Ted Cruz routinely says all sorts of stuff that isn’t true. Hillary Clinton has been shading the truth since 1992. Politicians are politicians. Anyone who doesn’t believe that needs better access to data.

But those are the expected self-serving lies. Carson stands alone in the improbable heights of willful denial. He says he’s a scientist (although surgeons are more skilled technocrats than scientists), but he also said, in 2012, “I personally believe that this theory that Darwin came up with was something that was encouraged by the Adversary.”

The Adversary is, of course, the devil.

If anything, religion is the Great Deceiver. It is the way that most of these knuckleheads (Trump excepted) frame their ignorant views. It is pandering, but it is not widely perceived as such. In many evangelical communities, there is only one source of wisdom. There is only one school. The Internet? Full of lies.

Yes, it is, but not in that way. If you Google “big bang,” you’ll get a lot of links to true science. But science is hard, and some religions deal in easy truths. It is useful to them if you stay ignorant. Gays are bad and submissive women are good. Check.

Carson said, in another speech, that the Pyramids were granaries built by Joseph (yes, the Technicolor dreamcoat guy). Actually, they weren’t. He’s many centuries off, but again: How do we truly know this? Scholars? They’re as bad as the gotcha media.

So he believes the Bible is literally true. He has let his superstitions take control of his reason. There has never been more information; there has never been more mistrust of information. According to the GOP, information is just a liberal trap. Better to believe flattering pap. You can’t go wrong!

“Once,” said the Mock Turtle at last, with a deep sigh. “Once I was a real turtle.” These words were followed by a very long silence, broken only by jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.